Multitasking and Mental Acuity

The solution is to give up on multitasking and set aside dedicated chunks of time for each separate activity. So only check your email first thing in the morning and again at midday, or set aside 10 minutes per afternoon for Twitter.

While reading the article I kept saying to myself: “this is why I like iOS better”. I know many people like to argue that I could make OS X, pardon me macOS, more like iOS — but that’s a poor substitute for the real thing.

At the very core of iOS is the idea that you do one thing at a time. Push notifications should be used sparingly — that’s why every app must ask for your permission first — and everything else is whisked away when you are using an app. Yes, this could be done on macOS, but it never quite matches the experience in any meaningful way.

Split-view isn’t an omission that iOS is too focused either — it’s an acknowledgement that sometimes (often?) your focused work cannot be done in one app. Whether it is research, reference, or collaboration — sometimes focused work needs more than one app. That’s what split-view is for and nothing else.

One way is not better than the other — by no means can anyone make that claim (save Trump) — but you would be hard pressed to say that iOS and macOS fundamentally work the same.

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